bombing of Coventry
Coventry Cathedral was destroyed during the bombing
Coventry, industrial city in
the British midlands was attacked on the night of 14/15
November 1940 by German bombers employing, for the first
time, their Pathfinder Force, KG100, and the X Gerat beam
system for finding their target.
ULTRA intelligence and prisoner of war information
forewarned the British of a major Luftwaffe operation
(MOONLIGHT SONATA) against a number of their cities. These
included Birmingham, Coventry, and Wolverhampton, but the
information was not correlated and there were also
indications that the targets might be in London and the
south of England. In any case, it was impossible to tell
which would be attacked first and the ENIGMA signals giving
their direction to the stations emitting them were not
broken in time. By 1500 on the day of the raid the beams
were found to intersect over Coventry, but electronic
counter measures failed to work as the jammers were
incorrectly set. The fact that Coventry was to be the target
that night was passed on to RAF Fighter Command but 'British
counter measures proved ineffective:' of the 509 bombers the
German Air Force dispatched to Coventry, 449 reached the
target and only one was certainly destroyed'. This failure
probably hastened the scheduled departure of Crowling from
Fighter Command and from it grew the myth that Coventry was
left to the mercy of the Luftwaffe in order to protect the
secret of ULTRA.
Twelve armaments factories and much of the city centre,
including the 14th-century cathedral, were destroyed, and
380 people were killed and 865 injured.
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